Any Way the Wind Blows
by odds fish
Summary: As with so many tales of the Dark Brotherhood, it begins with a boy, a murder - and a vow.


Any Way the Wind Blows

As with so many tales of the Dark Brotherhood, it begins with a boy, a murder - and a vow.

It happens like this:

Six o'clock in the evening. An ordinary Morndas in the autumn, 3E408. The setting is a village in northwestern High Rock; it is raining softly outside. A boy and his mother sit down to dinner in a small gray house. Father is absent (again), and the table is spare: a bit of fish, some boiled leek, half a loaf of rough brown bread. It is enough.

Mother prays over the meal. _Mara Mother, we thank You for these blessings. Mother Mara, watch over us, guide us and protect us._ The boy prays too, head bowed, reverent beyond his years, and Mother is proud of him.

Then they eat, quietly, with the speed of those who know that food is life and life is ever uncertain. When they are finished it is time for sleep. Mother folds him into a gray blanket and tells him she loves him, and leaves him to dream of knights and castles, maidens and dragons, adventures he will never know. It is still raining outside, the cold dirty gray rain of the waking world, and she listens to the rain sadly for a time, standing still to watch over her son, oblivious to the assassin crouching just outside the front door.

He does not look like an assassin, not this one, not yet. His face and hands are soft and pale and clean; his long hair is bound back beneath a dark cloak. His suit is simple but richly made, and immaculate even in the damp. He looks rather like a young dandy in the wrong part of town. But the ebony dagger at his side is wicked sharp, and his dark eyes burn with an unholy fire. And he offers a silent prayer of his own.

_Father Sithis, Lord of all, guide my blade as I send Your wayward children back to the Void. Father Sithis, make me calm as nothingness, black as the night, all-consuming as Chaos. I give myself to You, my Dread Father, who was before Time and will be after all Time has passed_.

Sithis makes a fearsome father for one so young, but He most certainly understands this one better than his natural father ever did. Or He is more interesting, in any case. And the natural father is dead, of course. It was an easy kill, and the first besides. The first is always the hardest.

The second is much easier.

He waits until it is fully dark outside - not very long - then places a hand on the door. The lit lamp in the far window tells him she isn't in the front room, and that the far window will be her only means of escape if he comes in through the front door. The door creaks as he opens it, and there is scuffling over by the lamp, but he is not worried. In all likelihood she won't expect an assassin. (Who ever does?)

She is standing by an old empty bed, and turns to greet him as he steps near the light. "Robert-" she starts to say, but then she sees him, and sees his dagger, and her soft eyes meet his dark ones and widen in comprehension. "Oh."

He grabs her by the wrist and spins her in towards him in one fluid motion, elegantly despite her struggles. In an instant he has one hand clasped over her mouth and the other poised to slit her throat. Oh, he is so damned _good_ at this. "Lucien Lachance at your service, madam," he says, his voice smooth and dark and deep. She tries to break free but he holds her firm. "Please, give my regards to my Dread Father Sithis," he says, and then he slices her throat open clear to the bone.

_Godspeed_.

And then he exits, off into the rain.

* * *

The boy does not watch him leave. He is under the bed, staring at the twitching corpse of his mother. Her head is wrenched backwards, almost detached from her neck, and her warm blood pools on the rough floorboards... pulses out as if her heart still beats. He knows he shouldn't watch. His mother is dead, and it is horrible, and that should be that. But there is nothing else to see. He feels strangely blank, strangely light, floating in the aether... watches the blood, sees only the blood, hears only his own heartbeat, does not believe.

He climbs out from underneath the bed, and vaguely he wonders how... this... happened. It is not real. She was Mother, not two minutes ago, and now she is on the floor, cold and red and dead. And he is standing here, watching and pulsing and _not believing_...

And where is Father? She _said _it was Father, when the door creaked open, told him to get under the bed _quickly_, he's probably drunk again, he won't want to see you. But it wasn't Father. Father isn't here. _And Mother isn't either..._

Mother, Mother. That - Lucien Lachance, his name was, Lucien Lachance, nobody could possibly have a name like _that_ - he just shoved her inside and - _killed_ her. _Why_? They know no Lucien Lachance.

Lucien Lachance. Not a real name, surely. It was a silly name, a sinister name, a Breton name for a - a Nibenean, those strange dark people to the south and east. A dream name. A dream like this can't possibly be real. And where is Father?

When the boy sleeps, he dreams of castles and knights and dragons, and a queen who rules with soft eyes. A man with a sneering face comes to kill her in the night, but the boy is there, sword and shield in hand, and he cuts down the assassin in a fierce battle. _Mother, Mother, I saved you_, he says, and she smiles and tells him she loves him.

He wakes to the creak of a door opening, a lamp in the night, a face of gold and shadow.

"Left you, did they?" the face grunts.

The boy blinks. Heart beats. Once, twice. "Father?"

"Suppose they had to, deals being deals," he mutters. He sits down on a crate, grimaces at Mother on the floor. "Some rough night, eh boy?"

_Rough night_. The blood is congealing; her soft eyes are wide and cast over. "He killed her," the boy says blankly. He forces himself to look at Father.

Father nods. "That he did. Sloppy, though, if he let you watch. Weren't supposed to leave no witnesses, I thought." He shrugs and looks down at the blood.

The boy stares at him without really meaning to, just that his eyes can't rest on anything else. "He said his _name_," he says, as if it were important. Father is silent, just takes out his bone pipe and lights it, chews the end and puffs. The boy waits. _One puff, two, three_. "His _name_, Father. Lucien Lachance."

His father snorts. "That'll be fake," he says. "And what of it?"

"He _killed_ her, Father. We... we could kill him _back_."

"Don't be stupid, of course he killed her. I paid him to. Cost an awful lot of gold and trouble. And now she's dead, and you're going to have to come with me, I s'pose."

The boy stares at him.

"Look," Father says, "don't worry yourself about it. Best you can do is forget. We're leaving in the morning, soon as we bury _this_." He prods her shoulder with his boot.

The boy tenses. "You... _paid_..."

"That's right, and you'd best shut up if you can't forget. Come on." Father hoists himself to his feet. "Get that shovel by the door there. We've got a hole to dig tonight."

They dig the grave a little ways out of the village. Out of sight, since Father says the town plot would attract too much attention. The earth is soft from the rain and the digging is easy, though Father still does most of the work, and they do not quite reach six foot before dawn. Father stops as the deep blue sky begins to fade at the edges.

"That'll be it," he says. "Don't want to risk being out here in the daylight." He hands the shovel up. "Here, you can carry this back."

Father starts to climb out of the hole. As his head is bowed over the dirt, the boy brings the shovel down sharply across the back of his skull. Father falls back into the grave, limbs sprawling lifelessly beneath him. And there is blood, but not too much.

The boy tightens his grip on the shovel and surveys his work. The first is always the hardest.

When he returns to the little gray house he is not sure what to do. Mother deserves a grave, and Father does not. But he will never be able to carry Mother all that way, or for that matter move Father from that deep hole. It would be wrong to bury them together. Father _killed_ her, or as good as did, him and Lucien Lachance both, and she deserves a better resting place.

She must be buried. But he needs to leave soon. The blue has faded to gray and now to pink, and soon people will be about and asking questions. She deserves a grave, but he is a murderer now and cannot give her one.

There is nothing else for it; she must come with him. He holds the shovel awkwardly above her neck, and her beautiful kind dead face. This is so much harder than killing Father. _That_ was the easiest thing he's ever done.

* * *

The sun rises on two boys, two killers, two vows.

In a quiet wood, the sixteen-year-old assassin calling himself Lucien Lachance dismounts his black horse. He greets the High Elf Arquen, a Speaker for the Dark Brotherhood. She places her black-gloved hand upon his shoulder, and he renounces his life of bored nobility and pledges his soul to Sithis.

Meanwhile, on the side of a road not too far away, nine-year-old Mathieu Bellamont carries his mother's head in a bag and vows to kill Lucien Lachance.


End file.
